1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of a wireless communication technology, and more particularly, to a system for initializing an RF module through non-volatile control and a method of initializing an RF module through non-volatile control.
2. Description of Related Art
With the emergence of Mobile Internet and Internet of Things, wireless communication has become an important channel for acquiring and transmitting information in our daily life. One or more RF transceivers (more generally referred to as RF modules herein), like the RF front-ends for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, 3G and LTE, are necessarily integrated in a wireless communication terminal such as in a mobile device or an Internet of Things node. In order to enable a wireless communication terminal to provide high quality of service (QoS) under different channel conditions, its RF module usually requires to operate with relatively high power accounting for a large proportion of the total power consumption of a terminal. On the other hand, it is a trend that wireless communication terminals need to be smaller and cheaper, and thus their energy storage capacity becomes constrained. Some terminals adopt the energy harvesting scheme like solar energy and vibration energy to overcome the energy limitation problem. In this case, however, due to the fact that the energy generated from an energy harvester is easily subject to the change of environments, the terminals are expected to be of high power efficiency and preferably be able to remain operational under insufficient power supply or even under frequent occurrences of power interruption. For saving energy, in practice, the power hungry RF module need to be shut down frequently and waken up at certain time only when necessary. Specifically, the wake-up of an RF module needs an initialization process, which restores its configuration information and the data buffer before moving to normal transmission and reception operations.
In a conventional wireless communication terminal, the RF module initialization process is performed by a software scheme running on a processor, and in this method the processor itself requires to be initialized prior to RF module's initialization process. This conventional method leads to a large time overhead with increased power consumption, and is thus unfavorable or even not workable when an RF module needs to be frequently turned on and off, particularly when a terminal relies on the power supply from energy harvesting.